Nah, you can join for $20 a year and get the bimonthly paper. www.thelaborparty.org
>Here's what I
>thought of the LP in 1999:
><http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9911/1098.html>.
So, it had already missed the moment in '99 and (surprise!) it's still missed the moment. Actually, at the '98 convention we developed electoral requirements, and all the people who'd been saying that they wanted to run candidates immediately ... didn't. This is because running a credible campaign is quite hard and requires a lot of base-building, fundraising, etc.
However, the referendum campaigns--about 12 or so--have been pretty successful in that they've (a) won without exception and (b) built the group, at least in our case.
>>>It's time for the Labor Party to
>>>reassess its strategy, confronting the reality of the empire, or else
>>>it will not have any political future.
Thanks for the tip.
>I'd be very interested in your thoughts on what the LP could do
>differently, if you care to discuss it here.
Not really the appropriate spot.
>As for the LP and the empire, here's a short list of problems:
>
>(1) Today, even just fighting bread-and-butter trade union struggles
>of necessity brings you up against the wall of "national security"
>and Taft-Hartley, especially if your union represents workers whose
>work is of strategic importance to US economy, to say nothing of
>doing anything bigger than that, like making the LP a powerful social
>force to reckon with;
Only one of our main campaigns directly addresses rights on the job, and that from an unexpected angle. The others (health care, free higher ed, etc.) address the population at large, many of whom would join a union if they could but they can't. With walls, of course, the idea is not to charge directly at it, piling up concussed bodies and doing the enemy's work.
>(2) After the end of the Cold War, capital has no reason to make the
>sort of compromise that it once made with unions (in exchange for
>support of anticommunist US foreign policy);
But the pressure in these cases is not simply external, without the CIO, for example, why would they need to have bought us off? Or without those lil' ol' U.S. union struggles from, say, 1886 to 1946.
>(3) Contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are now coming to a head
>- -- US economy may be possibly in for a Japan or worse yet a hard
>landing, with unforeseeable effects on global economy as well.
>
>How will the LP confront (1), (2), and (3)?
We'd be stupid to think the role of the LP is to 'confront' the empire status of the U.S. I suppose your point is that we'll never get the things we want as long as the U.S. is an empire. That's not a good argument for not fighting for them, however.
Look, hardly anyone's talking to working class people about any kind of coherent, pro-worker program. In contrast, we've got plenty of right wingers talking to working class people--especially to white guys. And we've got quite a few people screaming 'imperialism' from the streetcorner. If you want a hard landing which features a lot of people taking their frustration out on those who should be their allies--women, minorities, immigrants--then the recipe is: talk only to the most pure, and don't talk about jobs, health insurance, childcare, wages or work hours--instead, start with imperialism.
To me, the question is how to find the resources to build around the solid working-class agenda we have, cause people fucking love it when they hear about it. Abolish insurance companies? Abolish Mondays? Free college? Where do I sign?
Jenny Brown